


Vice Versa

by TheTartWitch



Series: Rewrites [5]
Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Allen is Hevlaska, Alma and Kanda live, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, The exorcists are Allen's children, metaphorically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:36:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6283015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allen was found in Hevlaska's place. When time passes and the Earl comes to threaten his exorcists he's ready.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Every once in a while someone would enter his room to ask him a question they knew wouldn’t be answered, but they tried anyway. His form was gaseous, floating between their fingers and clinging to their breaths, but he knew that he’d once been solid like them, stuck in a body that never aged right or didn’t age at all. That had been too long ago for these people to remember him; his Innocence, curling around him like a protective layer, was the original, the _predecessor_ , of them all, and yet they could barely manipulate what was left of themselves in a stiff breeze.

After decades, centuries, of sitting adrift in that open chamber, there came a day when shouting could be heard from outside the room.

“This facility is now the property of the Black Order!” Someone growled, ending all arguments. “We’ll pay your group adequate compensation, but you will clear all experimental instruments from the facility immediately. Is that understood?” It was a low voice, one that pressed obedience into the minds of the listeners.

The doors to his chamber flew open, heavy footsteps foreshadowing the appearance of humans into the room. They halted upon seeing the insides: white fog sweeping the room with concentrated abandon, forming clouds and shapes and Cheshire-cat smiles along the walls.

“Hello,” he says pleasantly, creating a mouth of see-through lips and pearly teeth in front of them. One of the group of four shudders and they all stare in fascination. “How do you do?”

After their continued silence, he begins to wonder if he got it wrong; if he forgot a word or if a few didn’t make it out at all.

“Hello.” The one at the front finally speaks, his voice low and cracked slightly. “I’m well, and you?”

The mouth freezes, caught; no one had ever asked _that_ , and then it moves again, smiling a sweet, childlike curve. “I am wonderful. May I ask what to call you?” He soars above the humans, wild and free and warm, becoming birds of fantastical sizes and predators with unsheathed claws and prey with adorable features in celebration. The others had never bothered with asking after him, instead teaching him technical answers and scientific theory. Their questions had always been the pursuit of knowledge.

“May I ask what to call _you_?”

The mouth crooks in response.

“You may address me as… Argyle.” He murmurs, keeping his old name to himself as something that he won’t need to visit again in this human’s lifetime.

The castle is quiet for a while, with scientists asking questions and studying his foggy form, but suddenly there are alarms going off in his mind and in the building and when a pair of boys enters the room to hide from the scientists because they’re _afraid_ ( _and oh, he remembers that feeling_ ), he warns them not to breathe him in and scoops them up, hiding them among the rotten rafters and wooden beams of his cavern. When the scientists flood the room, they beg him to tell them where the two subjects ( _his lips would curl if they could, and they do when they appear_ ) have gone and he creates the mouthpiece he speaks to them through.

“I am ashamed of what I have been used for,” he says, and he remembers them carting off tiny, concentrated vials of him ( _and at a thought the vials are breaking and he is returning to himself_ ) so he turns to the children, the boy and the girl in a boy’s body, and asks, “Do you want to be powerful?” And when they nod cautiously, he smiles and breathes them in.

And when he sets them down, they are different.

They are stronger.

When they first start bringing Innocence back to the castle, he feels it nudge at him, asking his permission to enter, and every time he says yes and greets it and offers it shelter inside his foggy mist of a body. The humans were alarmed when he first did that, but when they learned that it wasn’t really disappearing, simply hiding inside a dimensional pocket inside him and could reappear, they grew very excited. This prompted even more study.

His children still sat with him, reading or practicing with their Innocence, trying to synchronize even closer, or speaking of their day even though he always knew exactly where in the castle they were and their Innocence reported the exact same thing back to him at the end of every day. It was always more interesting to hear it from the source’s point of view, rather than the clinical version from their Innocences. He’d finally learned their names, as well: Kanda and Alma, and he knew that Kanda was a boy and Alma was sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy and that Alma would always tell him which he was at the time.

Life was peaceful, for a while, and then the others began filtering in, disturbing everything.

The girl was an interesting case; her features were elegant but not over the top, her eyes were covered in a white cloth at all times, and her Innocence guided her throughout life as a sort of tug. He’d worried about how they’d fight but Hevlaska and Art proved themselves quickly. Art was protective of his holder and proud of who she’d become, and that was enough for him. Mugen and Fezā were much the same, so it wasn’t too odd. He could see her potential to become something more but he said nothing, knowing the scientists would take too much interest in her.

The second girl with the boots; she was stronger than she knew, and he hoped she’d be able to find out soon.

The Earl. He’d finally returned.

He wasn’t looking too well. The coat wasn’t a good look for him.

“You shouldn’t push yourself, Earl,” Road was saying, “you know you’ve never truly recovered from _his_ death.”

The exorcists had paused at that statement. He coiled himself inside the tiny dungeon room, glad he’d concealed his ability to move from the scientists. Now nobody would see him coming.

The smart Noah with the third eye was giggling and pushing Alma’s head underwater, and Kanda would have stopped it if he hadn’t been unconscious nearby. Lenalee was growling low in her throat and Hevlaska looked unsure, Art having been disabled on his command. He curled a tendril around her in comfort and laughed when she leaned back on it subtly.

He waited until Alma’s head had been raised from the water and the girl was spluttering and coughing fluids into Kanda’s hair as she leaned over him protectively. The Noah were monologuing, snickering at the exorcists and their Innocence and striking anger into his heart.

He funneled his fog into the center of the room just as Kanda woke, creating a body for himself as he’d never seen the need to before.

His feet, bare and twitching. His legs, long and shaped and tan.

His hips, slender and covered in blacks shorts. His abdomen, muscled and slim, scarred and golden brown. His head, with long white hair and silvering eyes, the Noah scar etched across his forehead. His arms were long and thin, with piano’s sharp fingers and bony wrists. Black tattoos wound themselves from his left wrist and decorating his shoulder, crowning like a shooting star above his eye. Crown Clown shrieked with giddy joy and became his sword and cloak, slipping a jaunty, tilted crown onto his head for fun.

“Hello, everyone,” he smirks, before raising his sword and raising hell.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Exorcists' reactions, Leverrier and Link introduced, Science Division assembled, and the Cardinal approaching...

He laughs when he realizes he’s shocked them all into silence and takes the opportunity to deal with the three-eyed one. His sword is faster than that one’s instincts and he smirks at the helpless terror in the boy’s eyes as his head disconnects from his shoulders.

“Wisely!” Road shouts, her candlesticks re-focusing on him in one of her heartbeats, and he sees out of the corner of his eye Tyki scrambling towards him but neither of them are fast enough to best their ‘father’s’ sword as it cleanly cuts him in half- or it would, if he wasn’t able to flicker between fog and skin like a bad radio connection.

“Argyle!” The exorcists cry out, and he turns to smile at them kindly as Adam’s hands wrap themselves around him.

“Hmm, ‘Argyle’? Is that what you’ve gotten them to call you to hide yourself from me?” Adam whispers, and he coos mockingly. “Or were you just trying to forget me, love?”

“Earl?” Road says, unsure what’s going on. She was only a child when he met her, and apparently she hadn’t known exactly what happened back then, when he was forced to go.

“Oh, love, don’t you remember?” He twists in Adam’s arms, touches his right hand to the man’s cheek. “I warned you what you would become, all those years ago when Road was a child, and you told me I’d never understand. That I was the enemy’s child, forced to take your side. That I could never really love you.” He croaked, watching the man’s face. There was silence from behind him, from everyone gathered. “You said all that, Adam, and then you murdered me. You killed me in a tiny room and left my body to decompose there, into dust. Into Innocence.”

The exorcists, his children, cry out. Kanda and Alma rush them, or try to, but their Innocence know that he doesn’t want them too close just yet.

Adam wailed, his hands clenching over the man he used to love’s clothes, and said, “That’s not how the story’s supposed to end, Eve!”

And Allen can only smile ruefully at him and say, “What do you think I said, back when you were only just beginning to lose your mind?”

Kanda and Alma haven’t left his side since he sent Adam and the Noahs away, explaining that he was tied to the Black Order through their Innocence.

The groups who’d worked the closest with him didn’t seem to care who he’d once been; they knew him as he was and that seemed good enough for them. One higher-up, however, was demanding that he be placed under watch even after he’d reverted back to his fog form and drifted back to the room he’d always been in. Leverrier and Link Howard, the man and his underling, always seemed to be somewhere nearby, grinning murderously and waiting for him to screw up. They already disapproved of him ‘influencing’ their exorcists; it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say he’d been working for the Noah all along, just waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

“But Leverrier,” Allen smiled at him with the foggy mouth he’d used in the very beginning, “all of the Innocence in your possession were once a part of me that split off into individual pieces. They’d love to come back and be a part of me yet again, but I’ve been allowing my exorcists to use them for your cause. Is that not trustworthy?” In reality, he’d grown tired of the man’s constant threats and threatened him in return with the seizure of all Innocence.

The Council had made Leverrier step aside after that, afraid of a world in which a possible ally was forced to become their enemy and take all the Black Order’s useful weapons with them.

Allen was content with his children sleeping beside him, and even allowed the science division to bunk beneath his fog, quietly improving their physical condition as much as he could without them noticing. He thought everything was going fine.

And then the Cardinal appeared, and brought with him everything Allen had wanted to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess this is no longer a one-shot. I anticipate writing a third chapter but I don't know how soon it'll be posted, so buck up, guys. Back by popular demand..?  
> Feel free to drop comments, concerns, or prompts below! If anything didn't make sense, let me know and I'll try to explain without giving the plot away too much...


	3. Last

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Cardinal is defeated in an anticlimatic fashion because I'm crap at endings.

The Cardinal is the byproduct of a time when Allen was truly desperate. Sending out the Cardinal had been the largest mistake of Allen’s life, though technically he was already dead at that point.

He’d been scattered and broken into pieces with the force of Adam’s imagined anger, crumbling into quite literal shards. The lack of a proper burial because none of the Noahs knew where he was, only that he’d died a traitor according to Adam, sent his soul into a cycle of pain and trying to wake, only to realize there was nothing to wake _to_. He’d begun to send out the Innocence, pieces of his own gift from God, as a cry for help, not to fight against the Noah, thought they turned out to be the perfect conduit for his betrayal to take revenge. Humans were chosen who were worthy and strong of heart and they began to attack, always feeling that yearning to be somewhere, to go somewhere, and help something, but never knowing where exactly they were meant to go. They were like children, stuck wandering from the one who’d brought them into being, but when he was found they began to mature.

Eventually, forgetting what he had done inside the Arc, Adam cut a particular corner of it loose. The corner containing Allen crashed to the ground, breaking apart several walls and widening Allen’s small coffin of a room. His matter had a larger space to expand in, calming him and allowing him to wait until something came to help him.

Right before this happened, however, he’d grown desperate. He’d sent out a large piece of himself ( _and there never seemed to be a shortage, something he hadn’t thought about until several years after the fact, of pieces of himself he could cast away, as though God was supplying him with more and more_ ) to protect the other pieces and guard the ruins of Allen’s cage from the other Noah, not knowing if they’d side with Adam or him but deciding to play it safe either way.

The Cardinal had grown to be something he feared rather than a piece of himself. It was obsessive, free-thinking in a way the others weren’t, and hated the exorcists for ‘using’ Allen. It had infiltrated the Black Order to ‘protect’ the Heart before Allen could stop it, and now it was facing him down. It wouldn’t win; he wasn’t worried about that. It was what it had done to reach his cavern that he worried about.

“They aren’t worthy of even _looking_ upon you, Heart!” The mad thing spat, uncurling a furl of Innocence from itself and trying to grasp the particles of dust inside Allen’s foggy form. “Come, we can _escape_ from here and _return_ to where you most want to go.”

Allen shuddered. _This had once been a part of him_. The thought made him cringe.

The doors to the cavern flung open, allowing his brave, wonderful children to slide in, ragged and torn and dripping luminescent feathers everywhere.

“Argyle! Are you all right?” Alma shouted, real worry tinging his voice as he looked around desperately. Within seconds he’d located them.

The Cardinal was on its knees before the mass of Allen’s mist. It looked as though it might be praying, but its hands ended in clumping, feathery masses and its eyes and smile were too sharp to be pious. When Alma’s cry reached its ears his head tilted back and it smirked malevolently.

“Oh dear, oh dear!” The Cardinal stood slowly, using the most of its bulky form to hide Allen’s fog from view. “Don’t worry, Heart, I shall dispose of these disgusting usurpers and return your pieces to you soon~!”

Kanda snorted, his eyes filmed with the Cardinal’s wisps. He scrubbed at them without being too obvious about it. “You’re welcome to try, _Thing_.” The Cardinal snarled.

Allen laughed boisterously. “Cardinal.” His voice held none of the warmth he reserved for the exorcists. “You wanted me to be whole again? Then return to me the piece of my soul that made you. _You_ obviously have no need for it, if you’re harming the other pieces.”

The Cardinal gaped, momentarily as shocked as the non-human being had ever been. It stared at its maker in wonder. “ _Return_?” It mumbled, looking afraid of the very word.

Allen smiled. It was the same pained, relieved, loving smile he’d smiled at every Innocence after their birth in that dark, empty hole.

“Yes, darling. Come back.”

The Cardinal stumbled forward a step, trying to stop itself, before flowing smoothly into a cube and then to dust. The exorcists watched open-mouthed, unnoticing of how the Innocence that lingered on their skin and in their eyes vanished silently.

“Well, that was dramatic.” Allen smirked, his human form darkening into being before them. “I’m sorry you had to see that, children.”

Kanda laughed. Alma tried not to follow him, but couldn’t stop himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know if you want to see something else from this 'verse. Comments, concerns, questions? All go in those boxes down at the bottom! ;)


End file.
